How Instagram shapes visitors’ relation to wild places

Nature-based tourism increasingly unfolds through social media and affects human–nature relations. Social media blurs the boundary between tourists’ homes and the destination: before travel, circulating images shape expectations and itineraries; during and after visits, new uploads influence others, extending engagement beyond destination borders. Physical mobility is evident in varied activities, while digital mobilities appear as images, ideas, and emotions transgressing spatial boundaries – also affecting how visitors move, perceive, and care for the environment of a destination. Examining how a platform like Instagram mediates visitors’ relation to a place expands understandings of tourism as place-making and spatial practice. Investigating feelings evoked by visual representations of nature-based tourism activities in Femundsmarka National Park on Instagram reveals ideas and ideals associated with the wildness of this place regenerated through digital content. Building on relational ontology and theories of wildness as more-than-human and emergent, we analysed Instagram posts tagged with the park’s name. Employing a reflexive and exploratory visual methodology with feelings as an analytical lens, over 2700 images were screened and interpreted. Collectively sensing the content revealed three interrelated clusters of ‘feelings of wildness’: attachment, mobility, and separation. Attachment emerged in images of close engagement with landscapes and species; mobility in images of physical movement such as hiking, canoeing, and skiing; and separation in portrayals of human dominance, trophy fishing, or fleeting checklist visits. Digital practices cultivate and recast wildness, influencing tourism’s role in shaping places and the relations that sustain them. We promote more diverse social media presence and participation for visitor management in protected areas seeking to foster ecological integrity alongside enduring, affective human–nature connections. Visual social media content cultivates and regenerates feelings related to places. A scientific sensing of these feelings related to tourism activities advances understandings of the worldmaking agency of tourism in the postdigital era.